humiliation to the Nation.  They demanded his immediate resignation.  Let it be noted clearly that Broderick was condemned, not for opposing negro slavery, but simply and solely for opposing the extreme southern contention.  Not long, however, was Broderick permitted to display his antislavery sympathies.  During the exciting campaign of 1859, David S. Terry, believing himself aggrieved because of certain utterances of Broderick, challenged the latter to deadly combat.  Reluctantly, but thereto compelled by long usage in California, Broderick met Terry upon the so-called “field of honor,” September 13, 1859.  Three days later Broderick was dead, a sacrifice, so all forward-looking men believed, to the wrath of the slave power.  “His death was a political necessity, poorly veiled beneath the guise of a private quarrel.”  This was said at his funeral, and widely accepted among the people.  It has been claimed that the death of Broderick saved California to the Union; that the revulsion of feeling following his bloody death was so great that his beloved State became good soil for the new teaching of Lincoln and the Republican Party.  Generously one would like to accept this theory were not the evidence so strongly against it.  To Broderick belongs the high honor of inaugurating the fight on the Pacific Coast against the extension of slavery.  In the outset of that conflict he perished, and the manner of his taking off gave to his message something of the force of martyrdom.  But not to the extent his admirers have imagined.  It should be clearly noted that Broderick believed in local self-government regarding slavery.  He believed that the people of Kansas, and the people of Virginia (as of all other states) possessed the right under our national constitution, of deciding this question for themselves without let or hindrance by the general government.  Farther than this he did not go.  To the day of his death, he was a loyal Douglas Democrat.  It should be further noted that in this last campaign of Broderick’s life the pro-slavery Democracy swept the State, its candidate for Governor being elected by a vote nearly twice the combined vote of the Douglas and Republican candidates:  And, also, that a year after Broderick’s death Abraham Lincoln polled only twenty-eight per cent of the popular vote in California for President of the United States.  Whatever may have been the influence of the Senator’s brave conflict in Congress, or his untimely death, it is evident that the crisis in California’s attitude toward the Union had not yet arrived, that the hour in which any man might change the course of events still lay within the unknown future.